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Likelihood to Recommend

ActiveCollab

Scenarios where ActiveCollab works well1) ActiveCollab works well for small teams specifically T&M teams.Its invoicing feature is unique & can make your life easy.2) It is very easy to use & posses good range of filters like on the task list, we can drag/drop tasks, Filter by assignee's,tasks lists, due dates, or completed tasks. 3) It has some simple but awesome features like when you're inthe middle of writing something i.e a comment on story and get interrupted,it retains what you wrote.4) It allows you to tag team members in threads of comments to grab their attention, its really needed when teams are distributed. Thus helping team members to collaborate easily & stay on same page.5) It integrates pretty well with other web apps like quickbooks , Slack, Trello, HubSpot, Zapier etcScenarios where ActiveCollab did not work well1) Tasks can not have multiple assignee's here so if two members are working on same task it did not allow you to reflect that.2) Sorting capability is not their under invoicing3) It did not work well for larger teams4) Search option is not very detailed & you may end up wasting lot of time searching one particular bug or issue.

Brightpod

Brightpod is best suited for someone that needs a project management software with recurring projects that can be templated. I'm not sure of a situation where this would be a good fit. There may be some features that are required that brightpod doesn't have like Gantt chart. Some teams may not want a Kanban style view

Timesheet Tracking

Change request and Case Management

Budget and Expense Management

Quotes/estimates

ActiveCollab

5.7

Brightpod

—

Invoicing

ActiveCollab

6.5

Brightpod

—

Project & financial reporting

ActiveCollab

7.7

Brightpod

—

Integration with accounting software

ActiveCollab

5.0

Brightpod

—

Pros

Its billing & invoice feature worked pretty well for T&M teams. ActiveCollab version 5, the current version, allows you to directly track time to tasks using the Timer app and later create invoices based on those time entries. Their statuses will change through phases, as you are pending payment, or after they are set as paid.

Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.

File sharing feature is very useful for distributed teams as we can we can easily share files, screenshots.

Also ActiveCollab ability to connect to Google docs, attach images and link to web pages make it unique from other project management tools.

AC easily allows you to track your daily tasks & serves reminder if miss on the targets defined by giving daily / weekly reminders regarding tasks and any that have gone over due dates.

ActiveCollab is quite easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can create a new project.

The dashboard and options are easy to see and it is well laid out.

Here user have an opportunity to select the number of emails they receive from ActiveCollab and for some email providers, such as Gmail grouping is enabled. So rather than getting multiple mails, it send you a summary of all the daily notifications in one mail.

It allows users to upload several files at once on task comments, and if you are set with the owner role, or have the member role but are a project leader, you have a Batch Edit option available on project level. This allows you to edit multiple tasks at once and change all the details on them, such as assignee, due dates, labels, importance, and more.

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCollab is 100% better than any of the other tools we have used. We had previously spent thousands of dollars trying out different software that was comparable, but this has been one of the best decisions we have made as a company. It's also the cheapest ongoing option, especially if you get the self-hosted version.

Brightpod was definitely the most attractive and we felt like it had the least amount of clutter. We hated how Wrike handled recurring tasks. ActiveCollab just seemed to have some complexity that we didn't need. The Brightpod developers are very responsive and were able to fix bugs quickly.